Balance between knowledge and poetry – Luigi Ghirri

The world of Italian photographer Luigi Ghirri with a guest appearance at MAI36 Gallery

Zurich’s MAI36 Gallery presents in its new exhibition summery light works by Italian photographer Luigi Ghirri, curated by Urs Stahel. The vernissage is on 25 August, 2016, and the works can be seen thru 8 October, 2016.

The gallery tells us: “For a long time, Luigi Ghirri (1943 – 1992) was enigmatically low profile. This was partly because his work was initially shown mainly in Italy. It was also because his sudden and premature death at the age of just 49 meant that he was no longer around to see the boom of photography in art. Over the past ten years, however, Luigi Ghirri has at last been discovered and is now talked about and celebrated as one of the most important and influential photographic artists in Italy and indeed the world.

During the 1960s and 1970s, photography itself underwent a fundamental change and came to be regarded in a different light. For many artists, this was a period of rejecting the former tenets of a purely abstract, objective style underpinned by theory, moving away from the notion of the photographic work as an absolute and hermetic entity in its own right, and becoming emancipated from prescribed ideas of what actually has artistic or stylistic merit… Only a handful of photographers such as Lewis Baltz, Robert Adams, Joe Deal, Stephen Shore and, in Europe, above all Luigi Ghirri, took an active role in this visual revolution and became a driving force in forging new attitudes to the language of photography as a medium. In art theory, such a shift is summed up by the term linguistic turn.”

And here a wonderful quote from the photographer: “It almost seems as though the gaze is divided into two incompatible and irreconcilable categories: knowledge on the one hand, and poetry on the other. What interests me, however, is finding a balance between these two extremes. […] Photography thus becomes an awareness of being on the boundary between the known a.” (Luigi Ghirri)